TeX capacity exceeded

[Lars Hellström]

At 19.13 +0200 2002-10-01, Christian H. Kuhn wrote:
>Hi,
>
>I try to install Softmaker/FontSite Garamond. I prefer to copy
>installfont-commands instead of writing fd-files, so i install same
>fonts (but for different NFSS-Families) in one file. But at a certain
>point, i get an error:
>
>-----------------
>(./5gmri8rc.mtx)
>(/usr/local/share/texmf/tex/generic/fontinst/mtx/textcomp.mtx)
>! TeX capacity exceeded, sorry [pool size=96988].
[snip]
>If you really absolutely need more capacity,
>you can ask a wizard to enlarge me.
>
>No pages of output.
>-------------------
>
>I'm sure that i've installed fonts with more installfont-commands. So
>where is the source of the error?

TeX's memory management is rather complicated. What happens in this case is
that TeX runs out of memory for characters of strings. The most common type
of strings are names of control sequences, but TeX also makes strings of
for example the names of files to input, and it looks like TeX in your case
was doing the latter when it ran out of memory.

It is hard to sat why it happened now but hasn't happened before. One
possible cause could be that the fonts you're using now has more glyphs
than the ones you've processed before. That makes a much larger difference
than the actual number of files, since the same glyph names are usually
used over and over again. The number of kerns might also make a difference.

That is however mainly of academic interest. What you need to do is follow
TeX's advice and "ask a wizard to enlarge [it]". In the old days (which I
am too young to have experienced) that meant changing some constants
determining the sizes of the arrays TeX use as memory and recompiling TeX
(not a trivial operation, which is why TeX asks for a wizard), but nowadays
it is usually just a matter of changing a parameter in some configuration
file that your particular implementation of TeX reads at startup. I have no
idea what the file in question might be called or where it is to be found,
you'll have to RTFM to find that out.

Lars Hellström